Biblical Humility at Work: Choosing the Way of Christ
Devotional week 29
"In humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others... he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant... he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!" — Philippians 2:3–8 (NIV)
Everybody wants to go up. Up the ladder, up in title, up in salary, up in how people see us. There is nothing wrong with wanting to grow. But many of us have quietly started measuring our whole life by how fast we are climbing compared to the next person.
Philippians 2 tells us about someone who was already at the top and chose to come down. Nobody pushed him. Nobody demoted him. Jesus, who Paul says was "in very nature God," did not hold on to that position. He came down from heaven, took on the body of a servant, and went all the way to a criminal's death on a cross. He walked that road on his own.
This does not sit easily with us, because we have been trained to move in the opposite direction. We work hard so we can be noticed. We speak up so people remember our name. We look at our mates from school, our colleagues, even our siblings, and feel behind if we are not rising as fast as they are. This does not make us bad people. It makes us human. But Philippians 2 asks us to look again at what real greatness actually looks like, because Jesus has just shown us it does not look like climbing at all.
Humility is not thinking badly of ourselves, and it is not pretending we have no talent worth mentioning. Paul says plainly, "in humility value others above yourselves." Value them, not ignore ourselves. It just means we stop letting our own rise be the most important thing in every room we walk into.
Picture how this might show up in an ordinary week at work. A younger colleague suggests the idea we should have thought of first, and instead of competing with them, we back them. Someone corrects our work in front of others, and instead of explaining ourselves, we simply say thank you and take the correction. We do good work and nobody notices, and somehow we are still fine with that, because our peace was never supposed to hang on being noticed in the first place.
None of this comes easily. Coming down was not easy for Jesus either. But Paul does not end the story on the cross. "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place." Jesus lost nothing by going low. If anything, he was raised higher than before. This is not a guarantee that every small act of humility we make will be rewarded quickly, or even at all, in ways we can see. But it tells us something worth holding on to: coming down for someone else's sake is never wasted with God, even on the days nobody around us is watching.
Challenge
This week, watch out for that one moment when you feel the pull to be seen, to speak first, or to get the credit. When it comes, try choosing the lower place instead — not because you have less to offer, but because Christ already showed us what greatness really looks like.
Prayer
Lord, you had the highest place of all, and still you came down for us. We admit how much we want to be seen, to go first, to be praised for what we do. Teach us to put the people around us — at home, at work — above our own need to rise. Help us believe that going low, the way you did, is never a waste with you. Amen.
A Tent International Devotional